Transformative OA Agreements Reached By Research Universities and ACM

January 2020

"Carnegie Mellon University has joined three leading universities in entering into transformative open access agreements with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society...CMU is the single biggest contributor to ACM. Additional details appear in Carnegie Mellon's announcement."

Member News --> #NISO LSA Members Univ of California (UC), Carnegie Mellon Univ (CMU), and MIT have entered into transformative open access agreements with ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery). See announcement from Carnegie Mellon here: https://t.co/DjG9KqXF9g

The link appearing in the tweet above takes you to a full length article published on the Carnegie Mellon site. Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries at Carnegie Mellon and immediate Past Chair of the NISO Board of Directors is quoted as follows:

“This joint agreement shows our universities’ collective power to secure the widest possible readership for our research,” said Keith Webster, Carnegie Mellon’s dean of University Libraries and director of emerging and integrative media initiatives. “By doing so, scholars at Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions can more rapidly advance innovation and discoveries that benefit society. If we want to see real momentum in changing from restrictive, costly publishing models to those that provide open access to our scholarly work, libraries must work together to build the business models of the future.”

That article contains the following quote by Chris Bourg of MIT Libraries.

“This agreement with ACM is a model for new kinds of collaborations between research libraries and scholarly societies,” said Chris Bourg, director of Libraries at MIT. “We are especially pleased that it aligns with the ​MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts​, published in October 2019 and endorsed by over 100 libraries and consortia. When scholarly societies and libraries work together, we can forge sustainable paths to achieving immediate open access to scholarly research.”

A second quote is attributed to the University Librarian of UC-Berkeley:

“This agreement brings to life a bold vision for how society publishers and universities can work together to make full open access a reality,” said Jeff MacKie-Mason, university librarian at UC Berkeley, co-chair of the team overseeing UC’s publisher negotiations and a member of ACM. “We can — and will — work with publishers of all sizes to navigate the transition to open access so that researchers and the public have free and immediate access to the world's knowledge.”

The full text of the official ACM press release, dated January 23, 2020, may be found here.